The Hormone of Darkness

A Playlist

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Pub Date Oct 15 2024 | Archive Date Sep 30 2024

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Description

A bilingual selection of tender, transgressive poems by a Peruvian poet and multimedia artist

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die.

Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.

A bilingual selection of tender, transgressive poems by a Peruvian poet and multimedia artist

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations...


Advance Praise

“This is a sensual and sumptuous corp de text, a fragmented reality in which, one day a week, the color blue takes a break so other colors may have a chance to be the sky. . . . Matuk captures and distills Otta’s fragrance . . . bringing us into the exosphere from which she gazes.”—Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

The Hormone of Darkness is a playlist curated con amor, cariño, and a feral proclivity for the ecstatic activation of queer mutant futures. . . . This book demands you shake your tail toward dreams and desires ‘until the words break down.’”—Angel Dominguez

“Tilsa Otta’s poems move like light through the body. . . . Sort of shocking yet uninterested in causing you pain, these lines can’t help but delight you. . . . The Hormone of Darkness charts a new thermodynamics—or maybe just the same old one we won’t stop misprizing.”—Ariana Reines

“This hormone is pulling me, at last, out of a darkness and toward an optimism I thought long since burned out. . . . The Hormone of Darkness is a brand-new, lightning-old, slow-motion perreo play everlasting planetarium tattooed on the body of the angel of intimate futurity.”—Brandon Shimoda

“This is a sensual and sumptuous corp de text, a fragmented reality in which, one day a week, the color blue takes a break so other colors may have a chance to be the sky. . . . Matuk captures and...


Marketing Plan

National publicity campaign 

Bookseller outreach

4-city U.S. author tour

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising

National publicity campaign 

Bookseller outreach

4-city U.S. author tour

Social media promotion

Targeted digital advertising


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781644453131
PRICE $18.00 (USD)
PAGES 160

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Featured Reviews

**Thank you to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the eARC of this beautiful collection.**

I have been on a poetry kick thanks to a reading slump keeping me from my TBR. I really enjoyed this collection and especially appreciated how the poems were written in Spanish, followed by the translated English version. I am nowhere near fluent in Spanish but loved being able to skim the originals and pick out the words I know. This allowed me to start building some context. The English versions then gave me the "feel" of the poem.

Overall, this was a really cool reading experience and the poems were absolutely beautiful. I would recommend this collection for anyone that dreams of a life untouched by criticism and the ability to just "be."

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